Continuing thoughts on coworking space classification – by borrowing from evolutionary taxonomy.

Grouping serviced office market participants requires careful consideration, and starting with the bigger evolutionary picture is sometimes easiest.

Take the humble coworking desk:

It is a distinct species:

Belonging to the genus “on-demand space”.

Which in turn is a sub-set of the family “serviced offices”.

Which evolved from the order “flexible offices”.

In itself a part of the “office space” class.

Being part of the phylum “CRE” or “commercial real estate”.

Which is within the kingdom of “real estate”.

All of which is encompassed within the domain of “built assets”.

So whilst the coworking product market is fundamentally connected to conventional real estate and office space, the complication we face is the categorisation of flex brands – each part of the family Serviced Offices and the genus Full-Time Space – to determine if there are multiple species in the category.

To do this we need to identify key traits which make them unique from one another (or not), using uniform classification points.

We will be creating an evolutionary tree of coworking to properly explain where each product came from and where it sits on the office space evolutionary timeline – in an effort to help put every product out there into a specific category or species.